Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State

Outer Banks flotsam reveals grim fate of slave ship

“Some beach debris is gruesome….In the 1970s a local physician found a piece of shipwreck timber on a North Carolina Outer Banks beach. The piece of cypress wood had two clumps of rust on it separated by a few inches. Close examination of the rust revealed fragments of a fibula and tibia in each. The explanation: The wood fragment was part of a slave ship that sank with its human cargo shackled to ship timbers, unable to escape.”

— From “The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline” by Orrin H. Pilkey, William J. Neal, James Andrew Graham Cooper and Joseph T. Kelley (2011)